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Process

While it’s broadly true that we are all doing the same job, and—on many occasions—even using the same tools, we can never truly know whether we work in the same way; so I thought it would be interesting to discuss Process.

When you sit down in front of your computer to some serious work—whether it’s agonising over a design, tweaking a wireframe, or coding anything from CSS to Ruby—if you’re anything like me, you have a set routine and a set of tools and habits that you invariably turn to. I’d be interested to know what yours are, but first—here’s my process.

My process

My work for the past few months has largely been either HTML/CSS template development or PHP/MySQL application building, so Photoshop hasn’t had much of an airing for quite some time, apart from cutting out icons and buttons from other people’s designs, but I do have quite a predictable routine when I sit down to work.

Productivity

As I bill by the hour, the first thing I open up is Excel, which I use as a basic time-tracking tool; every day that I do some work on a project I start a new row with the date, then add a description of what I got done and the time in hours spent. A totals row tells me how much I need to invoice at the end of the month or project.

Next is everyone’s favourite project management tool, Basecamp. I tend to use this exclusively within the lifecycle of a project, so that all communication, discussion, milestones, and tasks are kept in one place; I also occasionally write private messages to myself on there too if I need to keep track of information like a client’s FTP account details.

Development

Pretty much all my coding is now done with Aptana Studio. It has everything I need for HTML, JavaScript, and PHP development—code completion and hinting, project management, outlining, error flagging, snippets, basically everything you’d ever need, and all for free. The only other application I use for coding is TopStyle for CSS, although if they ever brought out CSSEdit on Windows I would switch in a flash.

Once I’ve written all that code, I need somewhere to test it, and all my development is done locally on XAMPP. I generally end up with six tabs open permanently in Firefox: Basecamp; the application I’m working on, and its admin section; my localhost’s PHPMyAdmin php.net (I can never remember the right order for function arguments, although Aptana’s code hinting is helping a lot with that now); and the CodeIgniter user guide. And while we’re within the browser, I couldn’t do without the Web Developer Toolbar and Firebug.

To get stuff online, I’ve used FileZilla for as long as I can remember, but just recently I’ve been trying out a commercial product: FTP Synchronizer. It’s great when working with large frameworks with lots of nested folders (I’m looking at you, FCKeditor!), but occasionally it doesn’t quite seem to work perfectly. The jury is still out.

Finally, there are a couple of other apps I keep open when working. The trusty Notepad I use to keep track of database alterations that need to be applied online; and Windows Explorer is also there for easy access to any support material—screen mockups, specifications, etc.—I might need while working on a particular project.

Stimulation

Last, but by no means least, is something to keep my brain from rusting up from staring at lines of code. iTunes is always open, usually playing something reasonably up-tempo or lyric-less. I prefer to have something on that I know fairly well so that I’m not tempted to expend too much brain-power listening to it; The Postal Service, We Are Scientists, Clint Mansell, and various West End musicals are all on heavy rotation at the moment.

Add a dozen cups of tea throughout the day into the mix, and you have a fairly exhaustive view of my freelance working process. I’m easily distracted, so GChat and Trillian are switched off whilst my work head is on, and I try to keep email checking and random browsing to the bare minimum necessary.

Compare and contrast

I find that, for me, the set-up described above works—I can get in some quality hours of development work and feel productive and efficient.

How does this compare with your own process? Why not write about it on your own blog—I think if we all share our own best practice working methods, we can all learn something.

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